We didn’t catch a break
We didn’t catch a break. That night, poor blighted “Alvin” hit the local news — anonymous tip, I was told — and the following morning, the entire investigation changed. Ollie was pulled into a phone conference with senior management ahead of a phone conference with the mayor’s office ahead of a press conference later that afternoon. Everyone else poked at their work the way Marigold pokes at food she doesn’t want to eat on the hopes that no one will notice. There was a pervasive expectation that we were all going to be re-tasked just as soon as the higher-ups figured out a game plan.
Tucker had left 98% of the paperwork on the Chinese grocery unfinished on my desk. I saw the stack, sighed, and got to work.
Type.
Scan.
Double-verify.
Stamp.
Sign.
Next.
At some point in there, as my mind was wandering over everything that happened, I stopped the paperwork and brought up the symbol I’d snapped with my phone. I sent it to my laptop and did an image search. Tons of results, of course, but nothing that exactly matched. The closest I found was on some Stone Age rock formations in Australia, one of a set of six all in the same style.
As part of my job, I have access to a web portal for academic papers, otherwise behind a step paywall. I was trying to find any scholarly guesses as to the symbols’ significance, but I’m not an anthropologist and it was slow going.
I was scanning the abstract of my twelfth dead end when I got a single-word text from my wife.
PLEASE
Mom must have phoned the house again. I imagine Marlene wasn’t happy with that. It looked for sure like I was ducking her now. I sent a reply form the bathroom. When I got back to my desk, the red voicemail light on my desk phone was lit. I listened to the message from Officer Ruggieri.
“Got some info on your missing person,” she said when I rang her back. She sounded like she was fighting a cold. “Local boy. Puerto Rican heritage. Went to seminary out of high school but quit after a couple years. Got involved with a Catholic nonprofit in Spanish Harlem. Various charities after that. Worked his way up. Went to night school in his 40s and got a degree in social work. By the sound of it, he had a real talent for helping folks talk through their problems.” I heard her blow her nose.
“Not a guy who’s likely to get up one morning and walk away,” I said.
“Not at all. Word is he had big plans for himself. Had a big break a couple years ago. There was a jumper on his building and he talked the guy down. In Spanish. Took like nine hours or something like that. Was in the local papers.”
“Doesn’t sound like he had many enemies.”
“None that the officers could find. Everybody talked about him like he was a saint. All kinds of stories. Not saving the world stuff. Just little things. Helping folks find a job or staying late to listen to someone who needed it. Big hands. Big smile. The best man they knew, people said. You think he got sick?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “His symptoms match.”
“Well, I’ll get this summary over to you, along with a couple pictures. Just please let us know if you find anything.”
“Of course. I don’t suppose there’s anything in there about his work at the Urban Outreach Center? In the Bronx?”
Ruggieri said she didn’t remember seeing anything. I asked her to make a note in the file.
“Anything else?” she asked, somewhat sarcastically.
I said I’d let her know. She thought I was being cute and hung up.
Strike . . . Shoot. I didn’t even know what number I was on anymore. Four? Five?
I pulled up my timeline.
Four weeks ago, Alonso White walked out of the Outreach Center and was never seen again. Two weeks after that, Jayden Cavett’s body was found in New Jersey. The following week, NYPD found a pair of homeless junkies in Brighton with near-identical symptoms. A couple days later, I sent out my health alert. Then the five Chinese immigrants. Then “Alvin.”
They were coming faster now. And I’ll be damned if I could see a connection. I had exactly one lead. I took a deep breath. I grabbed my cell and called Dr. Pratt. He even answered.
“What’s the good word?” I asked.
“We were about to call you.” I heard him talking to someone in the background. “Are you sitting down?” he asked.
“What?”
“Stomach contents were inconclusive. But all five of your vics were suffering a raging infection.”
“I noticed.”
“It wasn’t anything I’d seen before. And since you were so nice and patient, I took micrographs and emailed them to a colleague of mine at Columbia, who about shit himself.” I heard laughing. “He’s here with me now. Had to see it for himself.”
“See what?”
“Are you sitting down?” he repeated. “Mycena lucifera. It’s a fungus. Grows on animal tissue. Highly luminescent when flowering, and extremely toxic.”
“Luminescent? As in bioluminescent?” Some kinds of mushrooms glow in the dark, similar to fireflies and angler fish. There’s even a couple species native to North America.
“This one’s exceedingly rare,” he said. “Not discovered until 2009. Big mycology hunt in Venezuela.”
There was a long silence. I didn’t know what to say.
“You there?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“It flowers from the corpses of dead animals and emits a sweet stench, like rot.”
“To attract scavengers,” I said.
“To attract wasps,” he corrected.
Wasps.
That got my attention.
“The wasps walk on the flowering bodies and get covered in spores. They fly away. Sooner or later one of them stings an animal, depositing the spores under the skin, where the toxin kills the animal’s local immune response and allows the organism to get a foothold.”
“Jesus. You’re saying this is a predatory fungus.”
“That’s the theory. The fact is, no one’s seen anything like this before.” I heard him talking to his colleague again. “BUT . . . I’ll be damned if I could find any wasp stings on your dead illegals.”
“So how’d it get in in their system?”
“They appear to have eaten it.”
“Eaten?” I was scowling deeply. “Why would Chinese immigrants have eaten something like that? Where would they even have gotten it?”
“We were hoping you could tell us,” he said with a chortle. “After the mycology came back, I reexamined the stomach contents. The mushrooms had been cut and cooked before being chewed and swallowed, so they looked completely ordinary. They were mixed with breading and carrots and peas. The toxin would have kicked in quickly. No more than a few hours. After that, they would’ve been in unspeakable pain. Nausea. Cramps. The works.”
After a while, it flowers. And so complete its life cycle.
Wicked.
I had been right. Partly. It was something exceedingly rare.
But I still didn’t know what to say.
“Scotch,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“We drink Scotch. Single malt.” As if I owed them.
“Well, have one for me,” I said.
The two men laughed and that was it.
I immediately hit the web portal again and found everything written on the species in a single search. It wasn’t much.
What we call a mushroom in everyday life is really just the fruiting body of the organism. The mushrooms on your lawn, for example, erupt from the filamentous network of fungal strands that grow in a wide area under the soil, breaking down and feeding on dead organic matter. The fruiting bodies erupt to spread the powdery spores through the air, similar to how dandelion seeds disperse on the breeze.
But if the mycologists are right, this fungus actually evolved a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive species of jungle wasp. It uses the wasp’s toxin to get a foothold, to spread its filaments under the flesh of the stung animal, at which point it begins releasing its own immunosuppressive cocktail. The animal eventually dies and the fruiting bodies erupt from the corpse, and the whole thing repeats. I’d never heard of anything like it. Just one more way the jungle can kill you, I guess. Along with piranhas and malaria.
Forty-five minutes later, I’d read everything there was on the species. I grabbed my computer and barged into Waxman’s windowless office. It was early afternoon.
“Hang up,” I said as I opened up my computer on his desk and took out my little USB projector.
He looked at me like I was crazy. He hit the mute button on the phone but kept the receiver at his ear so he could listen. “The press conference is in an hour.”
“We got it,” I said.
He looked at me like I was full of shit. “Folks from the mayor’s office are on this call,” he whispered, as if the phone weren’t muted.
I projected my laptop’s screen on his bare wall. It was on an odd angle at first.
Oliver stared at the image for a minute before his mouth fell open. Then he unmuted his phone. “Yeah, I’m gonna have to catch you all later.” He set the phone in the cradle. I could hear the overlapping exclamations from across the room. Then it was quiet.
“Okay.” I got excited. “It gets a little weird.” I brought up one of the web pages I had found.
He read the title. “A mushroom?” he said, scowling. “You want me to tell the mayor’s office that we’re looking for a carnivorous mushroom?”
That was not the response I was expecting. “Well . . .”
“The story on the evening news is about a seven-year-old boy,” he said. “My kid won’t even eat mushrooms on pizza.” He thought for a moment. “Although if they glowed in the dark she might.”
“You can’t believe this is a coincidence,” I said.
“Maybe not. But if you take this upstairs, with only the illegals, the first question you’re gonna get is how your theory applies to the kid, who is the only one anyone cares about right now. And your answer is: I don’t know. You need confirmation, Alex. A second case, at least.” He sighed. “Come on. You know this.”
I nodded. He was right, of course. I rubbed my beard, then my eyes under my glasses. I’d let my excitement get to me.
“You look tired,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You can’t move a city by yourself, you know. Everybody’s gotta do their bit.”
I leaned against the wall. “At some point, that becomes an excuse.”
He snort-laughed. “Maybe. But insulting the rest of us isn’t going to change anything. The hospital pumped the kid’s stomach, right? Go see if they found something similar. Then we can talk to Chalmers.”
“Yeah . . .”
“Come on. Don’t take it so hard.” He scowled at the projection. “Jesus. Carnivorous mushrooms. Where the hell does something like that come from anyway?”
I thought he was suggesting we might be able to track it from its source. I switched the screen again. A single picture in a scientific paper of an odd-shaped mushroom erupting from the deflated, furry corpse of a half-submerged capybara.
Waxman read the summary out loud like it was his own obituary. “ . . . native to the Amazon.”
“Is that significant?”
He stared. “Native to the Amazon,” he repeated.
“Ollie?”
He sat up. “Call the hospital. Ask them — ”
“You already said that.”
“Right. Then go write up a short summary. Right now.” He dug in his desk for his keys. “Don’t say you cracked it. Say you got a lead or a hypothesis or something. Email it out to the team. Let’s make sure your name is all over this one.” He stood.
“What about you?”
“It’s your theory. I don’t need any credit — ”
“No,” I interrupted. “I meant where are you going?”
“I gotta run out. I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Run out? Five minutes ago I couldn’t pry your hands from the phone.”
Oliver grabbed his coat from the rack and scowled at me. “Just write the damned summary.”
“Aren’t you gonna need that?” I asked, pointing to the briefcase he had left on the other side of his desk. I bent over and lifted it, showing him.
“Thanks,” he said. “I can’t remember the glasses on top of my head anymore.”
I held it out and he took it. “You don’t wear glasses.” I looked at him skeptically.
He saw my face. “What?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothin’.”
He stopped in the hall. “Good job, by the way. You’re getting the hang of field work. It’s more about the personalities than the science.” And then he was gone.
I walked to my desk and grabbed my tablet — gift from my wife when I got the post-doc appointment. I brought up the Find My Phone app. I watched on the screen as a blue dot in front of the Department of Health building pulled away.
He must have taken a taxi.
I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018. You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta.
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The next chapter is: (not yet posted)
cover image by Sarah Mclean
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